


that's what the water gave us

by newvision



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 13:01:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13524813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newvision/pseuds/newvision
Summary: It starts the way many things involving him do; with him sliding into being.





	that's what the water gave us

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first piece of fiction i've written in 3 whole years so Please excuse me, but i've been meaning to do something like this for the longest time. Noah was a very dear character to me and i kinda just wanted to put in my 2 cents about things i guess!! anyway the title is from florence + the machine's 'what the water gave me', if you'd like to give it a listen

It starts the way many things involving him do; with him sliding into being. 

He can’t really explain how it happens. Seven years later, and he really isn’t any closer to understanding his own existence (or non-existence), than when his skateboard smashed into his face with that first fateful blow. 

(Or: when Whelk smashed his skateboard into his face with that first fateful blow. He doesn’t know what to call this. A murder, a sacrifice - just more and more blurred lines to add to the form known as Noah Czerny.) 

He doesn’t like thinking about it. His space is lonely, and scary, and covered in moss and forgotten things (does this make him a forgotten thing?) and Noah doesn’t like thinking about it. 

He isn’t forgotten, he has to remind himself. He has friends, has remembrance. Blue, a mirror for all other purposes, an unconditional friend to him. To run her soft (warm) hands through his hair, to gently put little glittery pins in it, to get annoyed with him when he goes on another hyper tangent about fried chicken. Adam, as frightening as he could be, as unknowable as ever, putting himself through endless sacrifice to keep Noah (himself) solid. Gansey, a lit flame, the determined set of his brow, the endless nights through which he’d let Noah manifest beside him, carefully gluing together his mini Henrietta, kings of the world. (Noah envies Gansey more than anything, but he would never tell him that.)

Ronan, the fiercest friend he’s got, violent and snarky and kind and grounding. A force Noah clings to when he takes “personal days”, when he feels more dead than ever, when he’s nothing more than a swimmer in an ocean of time and time and more time. There was always Ronan. (Once, there was Whelk.)

(Noah thinks he needs to stop drawing comparisons.) 

// 

This time it starts abruptly, like a video game jumping into motion after being paused for too long. 

His movements are awkward and too rushed, too much happening at once. There is the clearing with all of its rotting leaves and the hush of the forest and Blue and Gansey and Ronan standing over the Mustang. The air feels too concentrated, too electric, and for once he doesn’t want to tap into it. Doesn’t want to be there when they see what he’s left behind. 

As of late, that’s all he has. Things he’s left behind. 

He can try to make new things (like he did with all of them) but eventually all that’s left is cobwebs, and piles of decayed memories. He really isn’t sure he has memories anymore. They come in tiny fractals, like falling snow that he desperately reaches out cupped palms to catch, dissolving upon contact. Sometimes he remembers sitting in a booth with Whelk, eating gelato, homework spread out on the table. The flashing lights of a concert, without any of the heat. The gentle touch of a kiss, gone as quickly as it came, blades of grass against his back.

Either way, they’re snippets of his old life, like a book he read a long time ago and can barely remember. 

Seeing the Mustang shocks him, puts him back to a day where the sun was slanting through the leaves of the trees, and the boy next to him was quieter than ever, munching on a burger from the McDonald’s drive-thru that Noah had bought him. He throws the bag aside as he finishes and Noah complains (he doesn’t actually mind) and he figures he’ll just throw it away when they get back to the dorms. Noah jokingly grabs his skateboard from the backseat, and talks about doing tricks on logs, fiddling with the wheels gently as he talks. Whelk is barely paying attention, and Noah wonders if he knew what was coming, and that maybe he planned this. 

Maybe he planned to sacrifice Noah, and maybe that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. There’s a very fine line between murder and sacrifice.

And so, in the grime that coats the windows of what used to be his car, he reaches out a hand (barely there, as always) and scratches out the word MURDERED until it loses all meaning. 

//

He doesn’t expect Ronan to do anything. Which is why it surprises him and makes his eyes fill with tears he know aren’t really there when Ronan reaches out a hand, and gently etches the word REMEMBERED over the window. 

His chest tightens, and he falls backwards. 

//

(Sometimes he worries that his friends only remember the impression of a boy that he is now, a diluted version of who he used to be. Now, he’s more of a what - a ghost, a spectre, a shadow skulking the halls of Aglionby. 

He’s tired of being preserved by decay, but it’s not like there’s anything he can do.)

// 

Other times, there is no start - he just is.

He doesn’t fade into the background for days, and he feels more alive than ever. He thinks he can feel the warmth of the sun on his hands (he knows this is impossible), and he hangs around Monmouth, basking in the closest thing he has to being alive. 

Days like that, he gravitates towards Ronan. It’s an inexplicable pull, like a hook down in his navel. Maybe it’s because Ronan is so steady in his alive-ness, an intense, unforgiving presence. Something for Noah to hold on to. 

(Noah loves it. Loves him, even, maybe.)

(He doesn’t like thinking about that either.)

So he holds onto Ronan. He holds onto him when they’re play fighting, shoving each other around Monmouth, resorting to shouting childish phrases like “you’re it!”, when Ronan eventually backs him against the huge windows of Monmouth, and Noah’s looking directly into his eyes. 

Noah thinks that Ronan has the eyes of an emperor. Not a king, but an emperor. 

He’s still for a second too long, and then he’s tumbling out the window, shrieking in equal parts terror and delight. 

// 

Once, there was nothing at all. 

He used to say that all this was a circle, a never-ending cycle beginning only with murder, murder, murder. 

And once, only once, was that circle broken.

He wasn’t himself. He doesn’t know how to begin explaining it. He had manifested (he hates that word), come into the light, and then it felt like something very heavy had crawled onto his back. He doesn’t know where it came from. 

It was like being held underwater, almost. He could see Blue and Gansey and Calla, staring at him, could sense how frightened they were. He tried reaching out for Blue, but his hands weren’t his anymore. (He thinks that maybe this is how Adam feels all the time. The thought makes him sick.) He sees things in snippets, tries to scream but there is only a voice that isn’t his, ancient and foreboding. 

Sit back, it tells him. You aren’t here anymore. There was never a you, there is only us, there is only power.   
More than anything in the world, he wants to scream. He knows he’s hurting Blue, he isn’t there but he can feel the gentle outline of her face against his hands, what’s happened to his hands --- 

And then he hears it, clear as day.

Be. Noah.

The circle is broken. 

// 

He thinks now, more than ever, that there were never really any starts. It was always him treading the waters of what he knew, what was inevitable. 

Time, after all, is a circle. 

Things began and ended with Whelk. (Once, he thought things could begin with Whelk, and end with Ronan. He knows now that this is impossible.) Sometimes, to make himself feel better, he lets himself believe that things began and ended with Gansey. He thinks of himself, lying alone on the forest floor, face caved in on one side, Whelk long gone. He thinks of Gansey, alone in another forest, miles away, dying all the same. He thinks of the life seeping out of him like a stream, of leaning over Gansey as he struggled to breathe, of the whispers of the forest as it could do nothing but watch two children die. 

It hurts him to think about this. But he is tired of running laps, of going in circles. 

He gets up, and leans over Gansey, gentle as ever, as if to wake him from slumber.

Maybe, for once, this doesn’t have to be all there is. For once, he’ll be a willing sacrifice, not a murder victim. For once, the difference matters.

“Goodbye,” he says quietly. “Don’t throw it away.”

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter @transwonwoo, if you're interested


End file.
